Business Expenses
So here’s my theory. The “herbs” that get consumed in the brass brazier is really just half a pound of pot. That explains why you’ve got to spend 10 gold (the equivalent of $2,850) on every casting of find familiar. During the ritual, the caster has to get sufficiently high to vividly imagine that their familiar is really something else. Only through a supreme state of stoned giggling can the mage’s mind alter reality enough to make this vision true. Thus, after breathing in the charcoal/incense/”””herbs””” combination for an hour, you wind up with a octopus where before you had a spider.
“Um, dudes? What if like… spiders were really just land octopuses? Octopi? Octopussen. Giggle snort.”
But I digress. The incidental money-sink that is magecraft is our proper subject here. High-price material components, random reagents, and the costs associated with spell research and transcription all conspire to nickel and dime you to death. This matters more in some situations than others.
When you’re in the early stages of a campaign, arguing about staying at “the good inn” or whether you can afford to not randomly die, the costs of transforming your cat into a bird for recon can seem like a big deal. You’ll often see permission-asking from the party mage.
“Guys? Does anyone mind if I use my abilities? Is it OK to grab some of the party funds?”
That’s just a polite formality though, because I rarely see groups objecting to this biz. If you aren’t specifically shooting for a gritty low-fantasy campaign, you leave behind these concerns in a hurry. After the party’s first major quest, the money usually flows fast and free. Minor component costs and research fees become rounding errors, and only the major magical purchases are worth mentioning.
“Alight guys. We need a 10,000 gp diamond. Let’s all give to @ResurrectDaRogue’s GoFundMe campaign.”
Maybe it’s just my group, but I can’t see too many players begrudging these incidentals. In my mind, casters are like traveling shops that adventure with the party. You pay a little gold, you get a little benefit. It just happens to be attached to a PC rather than a brick-and-mortar storefront.
So for today’s discussion question, I’m genuinely curious to hear some opinions. Who spends more money in your party, casters or melee characters? Does the question of “party resources” ever come up as a point of contention, or do you find that players are generally A-OK with financing a spell habit? Tell us all about your own magical slush funds down in the comments!
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The group I play Pathfinder and DnD tends to follow the path of, each has their funds but for bigger stuff it wasn’t rare for multiple members to chip in. Case in point Star Wars campaing three out of 4 of us pooled our cash to upgrade the weaponry of our ship. And in one Patfinder resurection we mostly used the cash of the deceased and had the hat go around the table to get the rest.
I feel like this is the “natural” approach.
Split the cash evenly and then everybody chip in for good-of-the-order purchases.
My table tends to reserve some of the group’s earnings as “party funds”. If there are four players, each gets 20% of the loot and the last 20% goes to a party fund that can be used to pay for party expenses. This also feels like a natural approach.
It’s just a bit more…”insurancey”. Pay a little bit all the time, and you don’t feel it when the big expenses hit. The main difference is that whoever’s running the fund presumably isn’t trying to make a profit off of it.
Guilty as charged, my current bard has a familiar and our GM is a bit murdery. My party pretends they’re annoyed that my boy will hawk his musical skills at every tavern and settlement we go through to collect money for his familiar but they don’t seem to complain that much when the extra buys them rounds or arrows…
Seriously though, we tend to spend our own shares and dip into the party funds when necessary. We keep money back and in the party pot that we all contribute to.
Believe me, I feel ya on the murdery GM. Remember Skitters’s first appearance!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unfamiliar
In my experience in 5e it depends on the character level.
In firt itier (approximately until lvl 4-6) STR martials are more greedy, because they are saving for their full/half plate armor.
In the higher tiers pricey spell components start to matter more, expendable or not, so casters start to need more money but typically it is already less of a problem due to treasure being easier avaiable.
All that of course can be altered by availability of buying magic items and finding spell scrolls/spell books to copy.
In my current game my Wizard is biggest money sink because DM is generous enough with spells available to copy.
On the other side he used Fabricate to create half-plate armors for all who needs them, so he is a good investement.
> On the other side he used Fabricate to create half-plate armors for all who needs them, so he is a good investement.
You see what I mean about the traveling shop.
My main casters do tend to eat up a lot of funds – when I take and use item creation feats. The costs are offset by the fact that I can then get the party some of the gear it needs at cost. Also, I can craft stuff not available in the shops.
The rest of the time, the parties I’ve been in have acted on a basis of equal shares, with those who need a little extra arguing their case or asking fellow party members for a loan.
Every time I think about PCs discussing shares of loot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXMyXypjmGM
In Pathfinder 1e, the lack of a caster (or more specifically, a magic crafter) is more expensive in the long run for the party than not having one.
Slashing your gold costs for new magical (and mandatory for survival!) equipment in half, in exchange for downtime, is a hundred times more effective than trying to earn the money in that downtime through honest / non-adventuring work. Good job, bard, you earned 50 gp over a week by strumming the lute. At the same time, the wizard got a discount of 5000 gp for the new cloak you need in that same time by crafting it manually.
Likewise, lacking a caster and crafter in your party is the most expensive thing that can happen to your group, as you are now forced to endure the economy of buying every single life-saving potion, every single restoration scroll to remove that -6 Con drain that you got from being poked by a Wraith, every magical piece of gear you couldn’t scavenge from a dead goblin (good luck finding the +3 Wakizashi that would improve your current ninja build)…
Even trying to skip the merchant middleman will get you some hefty costs, as finding a cleric to heal you manually or a wizard to dispel that polymorph effect on your Wizard will cost you an arm and a leg. Costs you could skip if you had a PC caster with time and slots to do it for free, several times a day.
So overall, yes, a caster will dip into your funds. But you’d not HAVE half of those funds without them saving you money by casting spells instead of relying on capitalism to do whatever you can’t do manually (if at all possible to do without magic).
> So overall, yes, a caster will dip into your funds
–Zarhon, July 2022
Will Skitters be renamed to Slithers or Squiggles now to better fit their new form? Or is this a one-off gag rather than a lasting change?
If the Handbook of Heroes is willing to incorporate a trick from 3.5e Ravenloft, this could become a feature.
In Ravenloft, familiars could benefit from the spell Faux henchman, which would transform them either into a humanoid form with a Commoner, Expert or Warrior class, or into a hybrid of their humanoid and animal forms (like a lycanthrope).
Two castings of Faux henchman, combined with a casting of Control shape and the whole dealio made Permanent would allow a (dread) familiar to shape-shift between three forms: original animal, hybrid creature and humanoid.
I’m sure something could be set up to allow Skitters to enjoy both the arachnid and octopus forms whenever she feels like it.
> I’m sure something could be set up to allow Skitters to enjoy both the arachnid and octopus forms whenever she feels like it.
Why certainly. Just hand over those 10 gold and/or half a pound of Alaskan Thunderf***.
Wizards specifically, other casters in general after them, but the easy answer is to split the loot evenly to begin with. “Party funds” are not very “fun” when there is a definite imbalance in who is spending what.
as a monk, I have spent less than 100 gold on a campaign that is currently level 16.
I have not kept exact count, but i think our wizard has spent like 50k gold, our cleric guaranteed 25k (for diamonds for res spells), and our druid who rarely spends much at least 5k (for expensive spell things like jeweled bowls and a divining mirror… made of wood and water)
The only thing our bard and rogue spend money on is rooms and food/boose respectively and our barbarian is almost as frugal as my monk.
While there is some spending beyond their means and the party gives to that spending, I think it still “feels better” if we all start on a form of equal footing when the coins are already divided first and then we can come to agreements through RP instead.
Everybody gets an equal share until the cleric needs to rez somebody?
But then what if you’ve already spent your individual gold when that big-ticked spell needs to be cast? Surely that’s a cause to keep a “party slush fund” as the fifth “person” in the group?
Everyone chips in for potential res, early on, we all had enough diamonds for the lowest level res spell, and now we all have enough for the mid tier. Each. Carried on us, just in case. The diamonds, not the gold for the diamonds 🙂
Easy access to an “oh shit” button is critical. Well done you.
Easy. Someone else pays for your resurrection and claims half your character’s gross earnings until the debt plus interest is repaid.
I’m in charge of our loot in our Pathfinder game. What I did was create a “Party” character to funnel loot to and assigned 1-10% of the loot to it (10% at the lower levels, 1% at the higher). We have a cleric, a druid and a witch for casting purposes, but it covers more than their components. Our bag of holding started for the group, so it was paid for by everyone chipping in. Restoration requires 100 gp of diamond dust and the fighter really needs that now, so that comes out of the party fund, etc. We have a few items that benefit everyone in there and we also put our potions in that fund; individuals carry them but it was a group effort. Scrolls for the party are created using that fund as it benefits the party as a whole; though as the only scroll maker in the group, I do make sure to run it by the others lest I be accused of abusing the system. Currently it has about ~17000 GP worth of materials in it (we’re level 12).
It’s strange. I had a player once upon a time who complained about how low their character’s Wealth By Level was. When I pointed out that they had access to a flying carpet, ring gates, a magical camping item, and other party resources, the wealth gap disappeared.
I feel like making this “Party” character highly visible to the players is good policy for that reason.
Martials are definitely more loot starved, at least in PF1e. It’s not just the Belt of Strength, the magical weapons and armor and sometimes shields, and all the class specific junk that lets them do their thing (deal damage, not die) better, or just the regular staples like magical storage and a Cloak of Resistance, but they should also try and solve common problems that casters can solve natively with their spells. By level 8, if your Fighter is still relying on you to cast Fly on him, and Glitterdust on every invisible enemy, they have failed to manage their resources effectively. Preferably they would have all-day flight in the form of a Valkyrie Helm or Carpet of Flying, and some form of special sense (at least Scent, if not Blindsight) on tap. This can get very expensive, but they have to be responsible for themselves eventually.
Casters, on the other hand, don’t really need gear. Had an encounter recently where my Psychic was trapped in a prison. My effectiveness dropped slightly after losing my +6 headband, but I still had all my spells and abilities. The martials couldn’t function without weapons, like at all. Sometimes casters even generate value, like an Herbalism Druid making an arbritrary number of potions or a crafter doubling the value of everyones gold.
I hate that my Runelords game ended. I was making a generalist barbarian who relied on general abilities rather than specific weapons. Talked about him way back in this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/weapon-focus
Almost enough to make you wonder whether “polearm specialist” or whatever is such a desirable thing.
I’ve always felt that 5e ramps up the costs for magic and spells in order to give casters a reason to accumulate wealth, and something to do with it. That spiffy glowing sword isn’t much use if you have 8 str. I’ve fond memories of having to commission a jade statuette of myself so I could cast contingency.
This subject reminds me of Puffin Forest’s recent video about reading the AD&D DMG, wherein Gary takes the position that time and money management are critical to the game. It was an interesting perspective.
> I’ve always felt that 5e ramps up the costs for magic and spells in order to give casters a reason to accumulate wealth,
I don’t think you’re wrong.
> Puffin Forest’s recent video about reading the AD&D DMG
Got a handy link for me?
Got you fam!
https://youtu.be/r89J0-vsq_g
Thanks; no clue why the link I put up never loaded.
To be fair to Wizard, most of the gold didn’t go towards the herbs, they grow wild, it went toward the pizzas and chips once the herbs got burnt. Elven Wizards have notoriously poor CON scores and resisting the munchies is almost impossible for them.
Damn those elven metabolisms! It’s so unfair!
In Pathfinder, my group generally accepts that any casters who can craft magic items will sell those magic items to the group for some price between what it costs the caster and what it would normally sell for (generally closer to the former than the latter). Something like 60%, if no cost-reduction effects are in play.
For more incidental expenses, we generally expect each character to pay their own unless they can make a case to the rest of the party for how a wooly mammoth or whatever would benefit the entire party. If they do make such a case and it isn’t blatant nonsense, though, we use party funds.
Howdahs, yo:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipmenT/goods-and-services/animals-animal-gear/#Howdah
When that mammoth is giving the party +4 to AC and the reach perimeter of a huge creature, it’s very much in your interest to make like Mowgli and ride.
Long before 5e’s system of lifestyle costs, one of our players was famous for never buying magic items or upgrading anything. He’d just use whatever we found if it was useable by his class and occasionally buy more arrows. His share of the cash just went into a bag of holding and whenever we needed to get horses, bribe an NPC, or get a round of ale, he’d toss some prop coins on the table and say “Sir Jack’s got this.”
In another campaign, my son is having fun as his low-level wizard balances paying to copy spells into her spellbook with buying food and candles.
And then there’s always the solution from the AD&D 2e Player’s Handbook: “Now, it seems to me that all of you are pretty beat up—and I’m not. So, I don’t think there’s going to be too much objection if I take all the jewelry and that wand. And I’ll take anything interesting those two dead guys have.”
Was Sir Jack able to keep up with the rest of the party without that all-important personal loot?
As for the 2d PHB… Methinks it might be responsible for some IRL fistfights.
Sir Jack Couldahad (in all of his iterations) is the apotheosis of happy-go-lucky. If he ever lagged behind the rest in badassery, he made up for it in Kurt Russel-inspired spirit and never noticed.
My groups tend to be pretty open about sharing cash among themselves. They have individual shares, but will usually give each other gold to help gain the +2 sword of more stabbing and so on. And that’s after they just handed out the physical loot to whoever wants or can use it.
This reached a kind of funny level in the ancient aliens campaign, where the party consists of: a PC who only uses scythes; a PC who only uses bastard swords; a PC who only uses his fists; a Kineticist who only uses energy blasts; a pet who only uses natural weapons; a pet who primarily uses guns; and a Fighter/Investigator who gets almost every single weapon the party picks up because he’s the only one who might use any of them. The Kineticist also freely gives money to the other party members because other than armor upgrades there’s basically nothing buyable that he can use – he doesn’t use weapons and he doesn’t cast spells.
I do remember fondly a moment in the one Level 1 Pathfinder 1e campaign I was a player in when we all pooled our money to buy the two-handed Fighter a masterwork greataxe, for a collective +5% chance of any enemy being one-shot. It was a small bit of progress, but it felt strategic.
Being the flexible fighter comes with advantages.
I seem to recall Gygax talking back in the white box about magic swords being a major perk of writing “fighting man” on your character sheet.
I’ve always be a big supporter of party treasury. It’s something I strongly recommend when I’m running.
That said, at least 80% of the groups I’ve played with are anal about splitting everything. Even things a particular character could use tends to be sold and the profits shared. I warn them every time that this will come back and bite them and it always does.
It’s so sad when the players sell off the loot. Usually these are the fun and interesting items that allow for unconventional problem solving. Watching those disappear into the maw of “I need +3 instead of +2 armor” always makes a sad GM.
So you prefer how Metroid treats loot compared to Diablo? I think a good way to facilitate that style of play is to make the dungeons more like Metroid. For instance, the party gets trapped in a foggy room with the exit above them, but there are Slippers of Cloudwalking inside that they can use to easily get out, and if the rest of the dungeon has foggy parts as well that makes it even better. If they remember using it before, even if it’s something easy like that, they might think to use it again later when they grab that Horn of Fog. On the other hand, if you drop those Slippers early in a random room then players sometimes either forget it entirely or sell it at the first opportunity.
Damn you for making an excellent point. 😛
“Tutorial rooms” seems like an obvious thing in retrospect. And that goes beyond the “lock and key” style of “medusa is coming up, you happen to have picked up a stone to flesh scroll.”
Now look at them ymagic users, that’s the way you do it
You cast the spell on the BBEG
That ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it
Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free
Now that ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it
Lemme tell ya, them guys ain’t dumb
Maybe get a blister on your little finger
Maybe get a blister on your thumb
Also Colin, don’t you remember this page:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/cash-flow
Or this one:
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0220.html
Screw the rules i have money
If you need to burn money to get what you want so be it. You don’t comply unless you wanna have roaming charges. Also the Mage: The Ascension Syndicate are a bunch of economics wizards that run their magic on money they make more and more and that is how they cast their magic. As once i read on a forum, a Syndicate member didn’t care if his magic was vulgar so he just tell a fire hydrant: “I am going to give you $200 if you turn into a flamethrower”. Money is magic and if you have enough you can just screw reality
First of all, take a level of the Cantor prestige class.
Secondly, I remember all of my comics. They are my children, and I love them all equally.
…
But I totally forgot that one.
My favorite Mage experience was 2nd hand. Still, it sounded amazing. Dude basically made and Iron Man suit out of scrap metal and junk. It did not work in a mechanical sense at all, but it was necessary for any of his spells. Dude was basically playing a 40k ork in Mage.
That is how Mage works 🙂
Also you should read your own comic some more 😛
It’s quite good and i think you will like it 😀
Aw shucks. 😀
For me it’s always varied wildly from game to game. Because different GMs will have different setups for what kind of gear is available for purchase and how much loot they’ll give out.
Though predictably you can expect anyone who needs armor to be the high expenses early on and casters at later levels. Because outside of buying magic items, fighter types just stop really needing money after a while.
Well I mean, everyone stops needing money at high level. What are they going to do, arrest you? With what army?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/consequences
For serious though, it’s interesting to me that the money seems to run inverse to the power progression of linear fighters/quadratic wizards. On paper, wouldn’t it make sense to give more loot to the character who’s at the lower end of the power curve?
I have a character concept for a Wizard whose aim in life is gathering all spells in existence. (Not every spell she can find — ALL of them. And don’t tell her it’s a pipe dream unless you would enjoy being turned into a lower lifeform.)
As a result of how extremely expensive this could be, however, she’s an extreme penny-pincher about those wizardly costs, using every trick in the book to reduce them. Using Arcane Shorthand to record low-level spells, Book of Geometry (thanks to levels in Geometer) for the higher-level ones, fabricating her own blessed books to further reduce costs, tattooing the free spells at a new level on her body rather than in a spellbook…
Also, levels in Dweomerkeeper for casting spells with expensive material components as supernatural spells for free, and for the few this don’t work, crafting herself the inks for Spellglyphs. Also, member of a Wizard Guild to reduce by 10% the cost of making magical items.
She’ll certainly produce at cost the magical items her party need, but they’ll be lows priority compared to those she’s making for herself.
Well that’s fun. I always appreciate a character with an epic motivation. Just because it’s impossible, that’s no reason not to try!
That concept would also be well-suited to an Archivist: since the Southern Magician feat lets arcane casters treat their spells as Divine, an Archivist can seek out individuals with Southern Magician and Scribe Scroll, letting them theoretically access every single arcane and divine spell in the game.
I predict a Katsushika Hokusai reference in the other handbook.
We already had a The Kraken comic. How many more tentacles do you people want?
“How many more tentacles do you people want?”
Yes.
I wonder how Wizard will keep octo-Skitters from suffocating, given he probably needs to be submerged to breathe. Maybe one of those fancy flying magic fishbowls? A permanency’d floating disk? A waterproof bag of holding containing lots of water? An animated aquarium? A spell that conjures an orb of water for the familiar to ‘fly’ with, like with aquatic minipets in WoW?
I’m quite proud of my “aqueous orb filled with piranha” in this one:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/215228/Adventure-Chronicle-2?cPath=8538_25116
You can squint to see Laurel’s art of it at 1:59 in the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFjvW2G7efI
My group rarely plays long campaigns nor do they play one character for multiple campaigns, so no-one is worried about unbalancing the party by uneven loot distribution. Money is split, items go to the member who can use it best.
Ironically, if I get to play my Vow of Poverty character, that’s when we’ll have to start tracking loot better. The feat requires me to donate my share for charity, it can’t just go to the rest of the party.
> The feat requires me to donate my share for charity, it can’t just go to the rest of the party.
What if they incorporate as a 501(c)(3) Organization?
50% of all liquid assets go towards party funds. Remaining 50% is evenly distributed.
Any magic item jointly belongs to the individual members of the party, and goes to whoever can best use it, but it doesn’t “belong” to that individual until they essentially buy out everyone else’s “share” If the party unanimously decides a magic item is not beneficial to the group, it can be put in party assets and used towards bartering.
In the case of consumables (rez diamonds, familiar incense, potions, etc) party must be informed and majority consent given for the use of party funds in obtaining these assets.
> Any magic item jointly belongs to the individual members of the party, and goes to whoever can best use it, but it doesn’t “belong” to that individual until they essentially buy out everyone else’s “share”
I always kind of figured this biz happened post-campaign. No more need for a +3 vorpal sword when you’re retiring to the easy life.
The modern gold by weight value is pretty close to the measure I use: Labor-value that puts 1 GP at $290 (Which I round to $300 for convenience)
A US minimum-wage worker makes $7.15/hour, or $58/8 hours. A 5E unskilled laborer makes 2SP/8 hours meaning 1 SP is the equivalent of $29 by labor.
Why yes, US minimum wage does map neatly onto a pseud-medieval feudal peasant, maybe we should fix that.
> Why yes, US minimum wage does map neatly onto a pseud-medieval feudal peasant, maybe we should fix that.
Stop saying things I agree with. It makes me feel as though the universe is off its axis.
My current party adopts a socialist model for wealth distribution: Rather than dividing loot X ways where X is the number of party members, we divide it into X+1 even shares, with the +1 being the party’s fund for things like diamonds for resurrection/greater restoration, buying magic items that benefit the whole party like Portable Holes, and other expenses that are to the benefit of the whole party. We find this much easier than asking everyone to pitch in whenever a party expense comes up.
“I have 400 gp.”
“I have 55 gp.”
“I guess I can cover the other 1,045.”
“I wish we’d come up with a different solution for loot distribution.”
Boy don’t I know that feeling!
In my experience as a player in 5e, it´s the cleric. Of course 5e have moved away from magic item crafting and buying being a core component, but spell materials are still pretty expensive. Also a lot of them are so niche that it almost becomes a quest unto itself to get ahold of. Which can be annoying.
At least when I was a cleric I regularly struggled moneywise, even when I got a bit extra from the party fund. Having to pay 100 gold of diamond dust per greater restoration quickly adds up. Or 300 per revivify. Of course I might be biased because the DM for that game weren´t the greatest when it came to rewards (And worse, didn´t realize it, so he was often confused why we had so little money), but I felt I had to plan my economy quite tightly.
In other games I find that it vary a bit more. I know that I have spent a lot of money as a martial in Pathfinder, so I think it is a bit more equal there. But even then I find that the cleric uses more money on casting their spells. Perhaps because the Wizard often “choses” to use their money to cast spells, while the cleric is “forced” to?
In other systems, with less of a focus on gaining power through money, I find that copious spending can be a pretty fun character trait. It is fun, after all, to roleplay something you are not, so I often delight in playing a rich idiot who can use money to get out of most problems.
Well now I’ma need an example. What problems did you buy your way out of? Honestly didn’t occur to me that “the noble” might be the big spender, but probably it should.
Guards giving you trouble? Bribe them.
The dwarf is going into a duel? Get him some fancy armor.
You are going into a duel? Hire an assassin to get rid of the other party for you.
You´re in trouble because the other partys family are saying you hired an assassin to get rid of your opposition? Hire more assassins.
You are in trouble because you keep hiring assassins? Hire an lawyer.
You are in trouble because there is a lot of evidence pointing towards you hiring an assassin? Bribe the guards to get rid of it.
In the more common way, there is stuff like minor bribes, getting the fancy rooms, buying drinks, getting ahead in queues by virtue of not being a peasent or being able to sponsor various events or competitions as a good way to buy good will or find hirelings. It is also a great way to get invitations to important events.
Then there is “Flying Circus” (A Powered by the Apocalypse RPG focused on air combat in WW1 Planes) where the Scion playbook is outright able to buy a Critical Success, should they fail a roll. And starts out with some of the best planes available. This video goes into more detail on the playbook, should anyone be interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBQntTPSUWw
The fact that so much of it is tied to monetary value rather than materials makes it hard too unless you have a GM willing to fudge thinfs. order of the Stick has gotten a lot of humor outof that.
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0306.html
And ghe first panel here: https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0677.html
Never have I been more jealous of Burlew’s advanced, multi-panel comic technology.
Seldom does an adventuring party discuss distribution of treasure amongst its members except to create a vague understanding that for the most part treasure will be meted out on a (roughly) monetarily equivalent basis. When acquired items throw that balance into question, the adventurers need to discuss the division of plunder to come up with mutually acceptable outcomes. That’s the key – communication. Wizard’s use of the party’s loot is a mortal sin rather than venal one, not so much because he stole the funds, but because he showed his contempt for his companions by following his own selfish agenda without consulting them.
I gather that we’re talking 50 “Hail Mystras” minimum.
I seem to recall my wizard dicing off for a coveted int/cha headband against a dwarven paladin once upon a time. Always nice to have a fallback when the discussing part fails.
I would consider the dice rolling to be a part of the mutually acceptable outcome. The point is – that communication took place between your wizard, the dwarf paladin, and the rest of the party. HOH Wizard’s mortal sin cannot be expunged by 50 “Hail Mystra’s.” Rather, Wizard will just have to be sentenced to play any future games as a member of his little dracolich brother’s party since his gaming sensibilities are so similar.
still riding on the coattails of my last pathfinder 1e game, we had a big ol party pot as well as item creation feats split amongst the members (wizard had one, cleric had one, and I had one as a magus too!) between the three of us we could make all our own magic gear by the time we actually wanted or needed anything magical, the party rogue has some unique channels to go through also, plus being a good appraiser and fence for the mundane stuff and art objects/gems. I actually tended to leave myself for last for a lot of things as far as making nice shiny new items went (it was a solo campaign so technically the whole party sans me was npc but we never treated them as such. RP for the win) even got to use the custom magic item creation rules once or twice
we did have some extra expenses though. The cleric of course needed some temple donations, which actually ended up being something the whole party decided to take from the communal pot as we all benefited from the divine goings on as well as donating to “allied” temples in other cities. This paid off very well when a quest reward from a head paladin was a diamond for a true res to keep in our back pockets for later. when the campaign is about resurrecting’s a dead goddess, turns out that goddess’ sister and father are like really helpful yeah?
also the fighter was a ship captain so a chunk of loot went to his crew as well as ship maintenance, and dock fees for long land terms. They also made us some money- when we knew we would need to be on land for a while/after we could teleport, the crew would take cargo jobs and pay for themselves and turn profit. that being said, having a boat was so damn useful pre-teleport magic, plus the cleric’s diety was the patron of the crew so he was kind of a rockstar (even more so when we saved the ship from a leviathan later on)
we got away with some pretty nice stuff via roleplay benefits and gifts from highly important NPCs in the world, but not fighting about loot combined with making our own stuff for essentially half price really went a long way to evening out the wealth curve. Plus the baddies had their own timetable also and it got moved up whenever we had downtime like that, so the world kept turning and kept having consequences. definitely a few times we just didnt have the *time* to make use of our wealth.
the wizard made and permanency’d a pocket dimension near the end also which was SUPER handy for times we needed somewhere safe to lay low, and foolproof safe spot to stash a relic or three.
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/2n952n/the_fighter_decided_to_ask_our_wizard_why_he/
I like this one